Implied warranty of routability? Was: Re: US CODE: Title 15, ...

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

At 11:12 AM -0800 1/31/97, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>>
>> >OK, I hereby assign you the address 1.2.3.4.  Good luck getting
>> >someone to give you routing.
>>
>>    One side point: there is nothing to my knowledge that insures
>>    that ARIN (or any other organization) is allocated "routable"
>>    address space.  Certainly, the policies of the various Internet
>>    providers need to be considered when performing allocations,
>>    but there no authority which can dictate "thou shall route this"
>>    to the Internet provider community.
>
>That's a really good point.  I had been assuming (yes, I know that that is
>a bad idea ;-) that an address allocation from "the" source would come
>with an implied warranty that it would be routable.

This is explictly NOT the case.  From RFC2050, section 4:

   5.  Due to technical and implementation constraints on the Internet
       routing system and the possibility of routing overload, major
       transit providers may need to impose certain restrictions to
       reduce the number of globally advertised routes.  This may
       include setting limits on the size of CIDR prefixes added to
       the routing tables, filtering of non-aggregated routes, etc.
       Therefore, addresses obtained directly from regional registry
       (provider-independent, also known as portable) are not
       guaranteed routable on the Internet.


>
>Although it may not be directly germaine to the establishment of ARIN,
>there could be some trouble from the assignees if some of the assignments
>turn out to be non-routable.

Let's say ARIN gives out a /24 recycled out of 192.x.x.x.  A perfectly
reasonable prefix.  Provider independent.

To whom do the "assignees" turn if they have a perfectly unique prefix that
is filtered out by a significant number of major carriers?  BTW, RFC2050
does make a distinction between allocations and assignments.  You are
speaking here of an allocation.

OK.  Let's say I start my own ISP.  I do not provide transit service, but I
multihome to two higher-level providers, and provide PPP access to my
customers.  Let's extend your assumption of implied warranty further.

In my contract with my customers, I state explicitly that I reserve the
right to filter out traffic from recognized spamming sites.  In this
context, I define spamming by traffic characteristics, not content.  Do my
customers then have a right to sue me because I have an "implied warranty"
of letting a PPP customer have access to anything in the net?

Howard Berkowitz
>
>			--karl--